Turkish film honored in Cannes
May 24, 2014
New Zealand filmmaker and jury president Jane Campion handed the top honor at Cannes to Ceylan for his three-hour long domestic drama about a retired actor running a remote hotel.
It is the first Turkish film to win the coveted award since 1982, when Yilmaz Guney was given the prize for "Yol", a portrayal of the country following the 1980 military coup.
Italian director Alice Rohrwacher was the runner-up, winning the festival's Grand Prix award for a movie about a poor family on a farm in Umbria.
French veteran filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard won the Jury Prize - the third-place award - for "Goodbye to Language", shared with Canadian Xavier Dolan for "Mommy".
The Best Director award went to American Bennett Miller for "Foxcatcher", a film based on the real-life murder of an Olympic wrestling champion by multi-millionaire John du Pont.
British actor Timothy Spall claimed the Best Actor prize for his role in "Mr. Turner", a historical portrait of the famous painter JMW Turner directed by Mike Leigh. Spall practised painting for two years before starting to film.
British-American actress Julianne Moore won the Best Actress prize for her role as a shallow starlet in Canadian director David Cronenberg's Hollywood satire "Maps to the Stars".
The Best Screenplay award went to Russians Andrei Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin for "Leviathan".
This year's Cannes International Film Festival, the most prestigious film festival in the world, was the 67th edition of the event.
tj/lw (AFP, Reuters)